posted by
Sarah on 2012.01.29, under
artI know this was a few months ago, but here are photos from the You hold it in your mind all the time artists talk at Art at 12, in September 2011.See a more comprehensive slideshow here.
You hold it in your mind all the time.
An exhibition of experimental work about physicality and perception.
August 11 – September 30, 2011
Art at 12
12 Farnsworth Sreet
Boston MA 02210
www.fortpointarts.org
You hold it in your mind all the time, exhibition
Heidi Kayser reflected in Sarah Rushford's sculpture "Semblance"
You hold it in your mind all the time, exhibition
You hold it in your mind all the time, exhibition
You hold it in your mind all the time. Artists Talk and Closing Reception.
Saturday, September 24 · 2:00pm – 4:30pm
Art At 12
12 Farnsworth St
Boston, MA
Join us for an artists talk about this exhibition of experimental work about physicality and perception. Artists: Michele Jaquis, Heidi Kayser, Jeremy J. Quinn, Sarah Rushford, Marguerite White, Tom Wojciechowski.
The exhibition includes projected and monitor based video, sculpture, drawing and photography that takes an experimental, scientific, or analytic approach to the investigation of the mysterious nature of somatic knowledge.
See the exhibition announcement and press release
www.fortpointarts.org for more info
Rise is excited to announce the opening of “You hold it in your mind all the time.” An exhibition about physicality and perception that includes multimedia works by Michele Jaquis, Jeremy J. Quinn and Sarah Rushford of Rise Industries as well as Boston artists Heidi Kayser, Marguerite White, and Tom Wojciechowski.
We would be so happy to see you at the opening on August 11 or the artist talk on Sept 24. Or stop in during gallery hours of course!
(Please note the change in the artist talk date from the printed postcard, which says Saturday Sept 15 )
You hold it in your mind all the time.
An exhibition of experimental work about physicality and perception.
August 11 – September 30, 2011
Michele Jaquis
Heidi Kayser
Jeremy J. Quinn
Sarah Rushford
Marguerite White
Tom Wojciechowski
Reception: Thursday August 11, 2011 5:00-8:00 pm
Artists Talk/Closing Reception: Saturday September 24 2:00pm
Art at 12
12 Farnsworth Sreet
Boston MA 02210
www.fortpointarts.org
617 423 1100
Art at 12 Gallery Hours
Mon-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 11am-4pm, Sunday by chance
Art at 12 Gallery presents You hold it in your mind all the time, an exhibition of multidisciplinary work by Boston artists Heidi Kayser, Sarah Rushford, Marguerite White, and Tom Wojciechowski and Los Angeles artists Michele Jaquis and Jeremy J. Quinn. The show dates are August 11 – September 30, 2011, with an opening reception on August 11th and an artist talk and closing reception on September 24th. The exhibition includes projected and monitor based video, sculpture, drawing and photography that takes an experimental, scientific, or analytic approach to the investigation of the mysterious nature of somatic knowledge.
Informed by philosphy, narrative, and neurobiology, You hold it in your mind all the time expresses and questions the folded duality of the self; the notion that the body is our infinitely personal, private selfhood, and is also a physical object in the outside world. Art theorist Gabriele Brandstetter writes of this strange doubleness “The body is a being of two leaves; from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees and touches them.”
Heidi Kayser’s sculpture Spanning the Rift is a suspension bridge made of eyeglasses which, Kayser states,“addresses the internally confounding problem of time and helps extend perception by closing the distance between looking back and looking forward.”
Michele Jaquis’s Until I Can Speak my Mind is a short film that was inspired by a recurring dream that both the artist and her twin sister have had in which the artist is chewing bubble gum which she then spits it into her hand, only to find in the next shot that the gum is still there and is getting bigger.
Jeremy Quinn’s What Holds Us Together is a video projection that depicts the Brooklyn Bridge with its middle section conspicuously missing, while the view into Manhattan (the World Trade Center towers missing) remains intact. Traffic seems to pass into and out of a charged void that separates the two sides of the bridge in this commentary on emptiness and separation.
Sarah Rushford’s Quickening is an interactive installation. Viewers reach into a box that contains a green apple and a live video feed of their hand is mixed with a recorded video of another hand touching the apple. Viewers report feeling a strange a ghostly presence as the two images mix.
Marguerite White’s Cargo Cult is a shadow theatre constructed with cut paper and simple light
projections. This surreal narrative is a reflection on the power of visual memory and the subjective nature of physical perception.
Also included are large scale abstract landscape photographs by Tom Wojciechowski, in which familiar objects—a hand, a landscape, set up a perceptual conundrum and create a space that can’t or shouldn’t exist.
You hold it in your mind all the time illuminates a diversity of multidisciplinary contemporary art practice to suggest that what may seem to be private, even mysterious somatic experiences are actually shared perceptions that might be articulated.
I participated in the Bumpkin Island Art Encampment 2011 with the Axiom Center for New and Experimental Media. Here is more about the work I created during the residency.
Common Names is a site specific sculpture made of approximately 150 beach stones wrapped in paper, and installed near a grove of sea grasses on the beach at Bumpkin Island. The paper was wet before applying to the stones, and as it dried in the sun it took on the contours and shape of the stones. After drying, I wrote a name on each rock in graphite. The names were a combination of common names, and names of people I know.
Common Names, site specific sculpture, 150 rocks, paper graphite
Common Names, site specific sculpture, 150 rocks, paper graphite
making Common Names
making Common Names
Volunteers helped wrap the rocks, and also helped to generate name ideas. The conversation about names and naming is an evokative, personal, specific one that even strangers can easily become engrossed in. Each name and each stone seems to be for one person, and for every person.
The stones with their names nestled at the edge of the sea grasses seem vulnerable and protected at once. They are visible from far away because of their color, but their shapes and contours match that of all the stones on the beach.
Common Names, site specific sculpture, 150 rocks, paper graphite
Common Names is about the strange dual sense of self that we have as human beings. On one hand we have a profound sense of individuality and private selfhood, and on the other hand, most of what we call our identity; our DNA, our bodies, our perception, our basic human needs, almost our entire identity, is shared with every member of humanity.
Verses is an ongoing work in which prose verses that I composed are written in a stylized text, on long paper banners, and applied to the ground in areas of the landscape that are intended as views or lookout points. The banners are tilted and appear like a subtitle to the view. The two texts that I applied at two key lookout points at Bumpkin Island are the following
“Everything will be fine, your struggle, and the fighting of your mind, the pitching motions of your experience.”
“The sky will take on a yellow cast, once this cast has grown into morning, let the light of that morning fall on your hands, keep them still until the light changes.”
Verse 1 Text banner applied to landscape
Verse 2 Text banner applied to landscape
Verses shares something with Common Names. While the texts seem to talk directly to the individual reader, they also talk to every reader. I intend for them to touch the reader’s private sense of selfhood and also their sense of self as an archetype in a broad humanity. They are like bible verses in that way, speaking to the individual and the archetypal reader at once. But unlike Bible verses they ask the reader to rely on him or herself and on this world for strength and solace, instead of asking them to look outside of themself to God or to the idea of Heaven.
posted by
Sarah on 2011.06.10, under
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Here are a few more photos and info about what Rise Industries was up to on Day 6-7 of the ICI Residency. Today, Friday, is the final install day for the exhibition, and Jeremy, Michele, Mike, and John are still at ICI, but I’ve returned to Boston, and already miss it!
These two photos above, are from the filmstrip The Air About Us; a 1959 filmstrip for grammar school students, about a range of ideas relating to air and air pressure. The slides are beautifully photographed, oddly diagrammatic and some with the same awkward humor you see in those above. The filmstrip, which I watched without audio, has a wierd tonal contrast between pedagogy and poetry, science and spirituality. It’s an experimental text and image work in itself.
I discovered what I thought was the empty filmstrip canister on my first day at ICI. A photo of the title on top of the canister is featured in exhibition. But, because it’s such a short filmstrip, it was actually clinging so close to the sides of its canister that I really thought the canister was empty. The last day I was there, I happened to open the canister again and realized the film had been there all along…
The Air About Us , the phrase alone relates to the work we did during the residency. The air about us could be the representation of distance using two dimensions; the uncanny quality of our 3d stereographic portraits. The air about us could be the cultural distance that travel photography can put between the subject and photographer. Or, it could be about misrepresentations of sizes and distances of continents in global projection maps. It could also be about the contrast of closeness and distance we encounter in video chatting. Also, the air about us, is about us; Rise Industries. It’s about our personal relationships and histories and the roles we organically adopt within the collaborative, and challenges we face as we make art as a collaborative with members on opposite coasts and more than one continent. Working with Rise at ICI was a fantastic experience and I want to thank Rise and ICI, so very much!
Michele Jaquis, Jeremy Quinn, and Sarah Rushford in the ICI Lab
Me video chatting with Boris Margolin in Boston, showing him around ICI. Time clock and multi-time zone punch card piece at the right.
John Kim and Michele Jaquis discussing conversion techniques for Pacific Standard Time to Metric Standard Time.
Above is the result of an experiment we carried out at ICI today. We made 3d sterographic portraits! This is one of a sculpture in the garden at ICI.
Jeremy named The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco as a book that is influential to the ideas we will work with during the residency. I read the book years ago, and decided to re-read it, beginning on my journey from Boston to LA. I’m struck by the richness of the text, and have been marking passages I plan to excerpt for work at ICI. The humor, and ideas of parallel experience emerge as I read. Jeremy, Michele and I are busy with the work of collaborating, unearthing an archive, making interdisciplinary work, and planning an exhibition, simultaneously, and I can’t speak for them, but I am glad to have this text at my side to ground my thoughts and ideas.
We’ve received virtual visitation in the form of art work from fellow Risers Nicole Jaquis and Tim Devin today! Nicole sent two very striking documentary photos of her father visiting Hardiwar India, where Nicole lives. We plan to pair a print of one of the photos, (a shot of Marty, Nicole and Michele’s father, jet-lagged and asleep ) with an excerpt from The Island of the Day Before.
Tim Devin’s work arrived in the mail this morning. It’s a project called BBC Broadsides. These are posters that represent statistical maps with information about Los Angeles demographics and water supply. They will be posted throughout the city. Photos of the posters in the city will be exhibited at the 10/10∆8 Exhibition. More on Tim’s project, another version of which he completed in Boston, can be found here.
This morning at ICI we looked at grammar school film strips on a Dukane film strip projector and decided on a particularly apt frame to include in the exhibition. The film strip, entitled Space Travel A.D. 2000, includes a frame that shows a drawing of a boy on the beach and the caption reads “We know that the world is round, but we seldom sense that it really is.” Michele looks through the film strip titles in their cases below.
About a month ago I had one of those ideas that just arises, one that seems to be uncovered in the mind. I’m making it seem like it was some knock-your-socks-off idea, and, well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t but what it was was a clear idea; with a static video camera, shoot two matching clips during the same ten minutes of consecutive days.
Rise Industries forces aligned, (Might Morphin Power Risers are GO!), and I shot my consective days video in Boston and Jeremy and Michele shot theirs in LA. And that is what is shown below.
Two Nights- Los Angeles March 2011
Two days- Jamaica Plain Feb 28 2011, 4:11-4:21pm, March 1 2011, 4:11-4:21
We look from left to right for the inconsistencies in framing, as if trained to do so. And from this we get more information than what is contained in the frame, gestalt at work. We get iformation about what has happened in the interim, some snow has melted, and the camera has moved. Isn’t it strange how the tire tracks are tracks in the snow in the left, and negative tracks in the right? Ghost like, the day in between speaks to us when we put time together this way.
In Los Angeles, there was no snow to be melted, and the two shots are so similar that it is as if the 24 hours in between has melted instead. The inconsistencies in light, weather, and the movement of the air are highlighted instead, and even the air seems choreographed to rustle thorough the left tress, and then the right trees, as if doing a job.
In both, the passage of those twenty minutes reveals the light changing as the day approaches dusk. In the right shot in LA, dusk comes on as an intense pink glow. And it seems appropriate that this wild act of light has been recorded, because it seems to be performing on the second day because it missed the opportunity on the first.
Sound in LA is much more interesting because it was recorded outside, in Boston the camera was inside the house . In LA it is hard to distinguish the source of the sound until you have a visual cue to link it to. If there is no visual cue the sound works as a mending agent across the gulf of the two days.
To me the work is evokative, mysterious. It’s as if juxtaposing the two intervals opens a secret portal through which the very passage of time can communicate.
The Boston shots can be improved, would like to crop like LA shots (can’t do it in Final Cut Express) more to be done on this project. I’d like to see how it looks projected large or on large monitor. I’d like to try shooting with matching cameras. It is actually pretty complex if you watch all four shots at once. And at the beginning I actually intended to shoot a closeup as opposed to the more landscapey shots we did. I think we should try the closeup next. Another way I saw this was to have the right shot be live, and the left be 24 hours ago…..Mighty Morphin Power Risers, assemble! (wait I think that’s Voltron or something).
Bruce Nauman show at Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin
I’m in Berlin till the end of August, as part of the Takt artists residency.
I learned that the German idiom Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof which means I didn’t understand anything except for the word Bahnhof, (train station) amounts to the English idiom It’s all Greek to me. There are certainly many days when pretty much the only German word I understand all day is Bahnhof.
Hamburger (…er) Bahnhof, former train station and now major contemporary art museum, was such a pleasure to see. Something happens to me when I go out to see art in places like this in Berlin, and I have to be careful because I am easily swept up in the musuemy glitz of it all, but I get a good feeling. It’s a feeling that completely goes against my more suspicious media literacy instincts. I sometimes get the feeling that the museum cares a lot about the work they’re showing, and that the artist deserves such resplendent spaces to let the work shine. I get a feeling that the work is a precious thing, and not in a negative way. I feel like an art rock star fan, and it feels good to feel this way.
Zarina Bhimji Waiting 2007 still. From film installation in "Who knows tomorrow" at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
But… as I saw more of the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, even though I was pleasantly overwhelmed to see so many famous contemporary works presented together, many pieces I’ve only seen in books, I was a little miffed to see so few women artists. This collection, (even though this was only some of it, its being presented over 6 years) seemed limited in social and cultural scope. I also learned more about the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection and the controversy surrounding it. His grandfather Friedrich Flick’s steel company was a major weapons supplier to the Nazi Regime. This article by interesting blogger Ivar Hagendoorn covers the first show of his collection at Hamburger Banhof, in 2004, and goes into the controversy a little more . Honestly, as a baby to Berlin and German cultural understanding, all I can think is, at least the money used for evil is now being used for good. What a simplistic thought. Ich verstehe nur bahnhof.
My disappointment at the scope of Flick’s collection was healed a bit by the Who knows tomorrow piece Waiting, by Ugandan artist Zarina Bhimji. The work is a very large projection of 35mm film representing the workings of a sisal factory in Kenya. The piercing beauty of the images illuminate the inhumane history of the industry. Who knows tomorrow is a Berlin citywide exhibition of African artists taking place this summer. Below is from the WKT website.
“At the exhibition Who knows tomorrow, Zarina Bhimji presents her film installation Waiting (2007), for which she studied the facts of this portion of colonial history at length. Although invisible in her film, it still accompanies it like a melodic theme. Zarina Bhimji visited sisal-processing factories near Mombassa, Kenya, some of which originate from colonial times. The beauty of the architecture, the bright, hot light and the simultaneously quasi-paralyzing atmosphere together with the minute movements and the sensitive details of the colors, the walls and the utensils focus the viewer’s gaze on the beauty of the material. Introduced by the Germans to the German colonies in East Africa in the 1890s and still grown on the plantations today, the material is used for ropes, cords, sacks, and carpets.The beauty of the sisal’s texture conjures up memories of hair, lending life to the material that takes on an abstract quality. The artist’s pictures and her sounds address the viewer in a highly emotional manner. The power of Zarina Bhimji’s works is based on their sensuous and seductive imagery, inseparably tied to the tragic and melancholic sadness and burdened by history.”
Heidi Kayser and I are working on an installation for the Melle Finelli Studio , the opening is March 5, 2010. Melle Finelli and Peter Harris have generously invited us to do a project in their jewelry and art gallery space in Boston’s South End.
Heidi and I have a similar thematic tendencies in our current artmaking. For example, both of our current work is concerned with
-using translucent containers to mediate materials
-interest in biological systems and microscopy
-using repetitive objects as metaphors for individuals
The title is “They believed every word.” It’s like a translation or synonym for “They fell for it, hook, line, and sinker”. (The hook, line, and sinker phrase came up because of the fishing-related materials) With the title “They believed every word” we imagined our viewers questioning their trust of words and mediation in the work. Also the “they” is sort of like the gelcaps, as representatives of individuals.
So now we’ve been installing for about a week, hanging hundreds of the gelcap/fishing line/bell sinker assemblies. It’s going pretty well! It’s exciting to see the work actualized. Ideas and experiments with text and lighting have evololved too. We’re concerned about viewers walking directly into the art and tangling it. It’s quite subtle , so, we’re also mulling over ways to make it clear to gallery goers that they should be careful. The project is going well! 
I visited the Musee d’art Contemporain De Montreal last weekend and saw the video installation Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33’’ with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films), 2008.
by Tacita Dean.
Our entrance to the museum was a bit disjointed and confused. The museum is the midst of the construction of a new downtown area call the Quartier des spectacles (see next post for more on that) so it was a bit hard to find the entrance. Then after buying a ticket, I misplaced it and had to rifle through my purse as the museum staff and the others I was with waited. This agitation dissipated though as we entered the Tacita Dean installation. There was Merce Cunningham in 16mm, life size, sitting patiently and looking at us or looking just past us, in six projections throughout an immense room. It was like that dream in which someone you love who died, comes back, without explanation.
In the projections, Merce Cuningham is performing John Cages 4′ 33″ . Cage’s performance consisted of instructions for a piano player to not play piano, and Merce Cunningham’s rendition is that he simply sits still for that period of time in his dance rehersal space. In some of the angles you see the person behind the camera, you see New York and the light from the windows pours into the room and from the mirrors. They are stunning portraits, simple and rich with conceptuality and with accesable human meaning. (and further enriched because here is a collaboration among Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Tacita Dean, all making thier own piece) To me they all state fundamental (familiar but welcome) remarks about the worthiness of experimentation and of challenging popular modes of media. To me, some of these are;
-long static shots remind me that media can represent stillness and this can be so engaging
-he isn’t acting, this is a documentary of a man sitting still
-be patient when making moving images
-there’s an old person on the screen, under-represented population
-he’s a dancer, and his sitting still in a chair and this is his dance
-the projections represent him life size, there is no bigger than life character
-the camera is shooting from several angles, and the projections are located all over the room, blowing apart the illusion of space that this media is often expected to invoke
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